Now, I can see Rich's loophole: "one of the most popular politicians in America." All he needs for his statement to be true is for there to be a lot of other politicians who are more unpopular. And then, job approval isn't necessarily popularity. Presumably, Obama still has this personal popularity, which he could somehow begin to use to do things people would actually approve of.

Anyway, Rich goes on to say that Obama is in trouble and must act quickly. He'd like to see Obama "exerting such take-no-prisoners leadership to challenge those who threaten our own economic recovery" and holds up an example of JFK "threaten[ing] to sic his brother’s Justice Department on corporate records" after the chairman of U.S. Steel tried to "break a White House-brokered labor-management contract agreement and raise the price of steel (but not wages)." Rich doesn't identify anything precisely equivalent to the U.S. Steel situation that would make good theater for Obama.

Hmmm. I wrote that last sentence and carefully chose the expression "good theater" without it even crossing my mind that Rich began his career as a theater critic.

I've got to say, I really don't understand what Rich would like Obama to do and how it could help our terrible economy. Here is the text of Kennedy's press conference. Can you extrapolate from that and apply it to today? The most Rich has is:

When it comes to economic substance, small symbolic gestures (the proposed new bank “fee”) won’t cut it. Nor will ineffectual presidential sound bites railing against Wall Street bonuses beyond the federal government’s purview. There’s no chance of a second stimulus. The White House will have to jawbone banks on foreclosures, credit card racketeering and the loosening of credit to small businesses....

Rich sees Obama's Cloward-Piven strategy cracking up, and exhorts him to take a harder line. The agenda of destroying the US economy is hanging by a thread, but Rich thinks it can be saved if Obama just acts more like Josip Vissarionovich Djugashvili.

A Note from InsideOne of my many friends working for President Obama sends me this email, along with permission to share it with my blog readers:

Regardless of how one evaluates the wisdom of the policy [Volcker ideas about separating investment and commercial banking] (and I fully acknowledge that reasonable people can differ on this), in practice the timing of the announcement (coming after the loss of the Massachusetts Senate seat) is being interpreted as "the Administration has finally decided to cave in to the populist temptation." As a result there is a lot of uncertainty about whether Bernanke will be reappointed and whether the new policy signals that the Administration is going to dump him. Honestly, dumping Bernanke was NOT the point of this announcement.

But it seems like Wall Street is interpreting this as "Summers, Geithner, and Bernanke are on the way out because Obama has finally decided to go populist." Honestly, that is truly not right, though I can see how from the outside it would look like it.

Oddly enough, this is one of those cases where the whole thing could be a self-fulfilling prophecy. The policy announcement had nothing to do with Bernanke, but now the sharks are scenting blood, inTrade is putting Bernanke's odds of confirmation much lower, and a lot of Senators are starting to waver and back off and say they won't vote to confirm him, so now maybe he can't get through. If not for the misinterpretation of the get-tough-on-banks move, though, Bernanke's standing would not have changed.

[name withheld]

PS I know it's a fool's game to try to explain moves in the stock market, but I have a friend on Wall Street who tells me that the selloff in the last couple of days is more due to uncertainty caused by the sense that Summers and Geithner are losing out to populism than to specifics of the bank plan.

"threaten[ing] to sic his brother’s Justice Department on corporate records" after the chairman of U.S. Steel tried to "break a White House-brokered labor-management contract agreement and raise the price of steel (but not wages)." Rich doesn't identify anything precisely equivalent to the U.S. Steel situation that would make good theater for Obama.

Trust me on this. The stock market will not go up, and small business will not start hiring because Obama increases his threat levels.

what will increase both is a sense that the long term regulatory and tax climates will improve.

1. The Narrative of America being inescapably wedded to racism cannot be wrong, people are just better hiding their racism and using code words.

2. Americans overwhelmingly are in favor of leftist economic and social policies.

With those facts in mind, what are the correct conclusions to reach from the Gallup data?

First, Americans are hiding their racism by giving Obama generally positive scores on personal popularity. But, second, they manifest the depth of the real racism by opposing policies, which they really would prefer, out of spite towards Obama.

While Barack Obama may be personally popular, the Obama-Reid-Pelosi policies are wildly unpopular, and to the extent that Scott Brown made his election a referendum on those policies and asked the voters to "send a message to Washington," that certainly helped his election. If Obama was a good politician -- as opposed to merely being a good campaigner, then he'd listen to that message very seriously.

It didn't hurt that Martha Coakley thought Curt Schilling was a Yankees fan.

Obama would have to radically lower our exposure to him and also stop changing the rules in which the private sector has to operate every five minutes to up his approval rating. He'll do niether. He's temperamentally incapable of doing either. Which doesn't mean he'll necessarily lose in 2012. When you put together the under-class, the over-class and the herd-naive that's a hard combo to beat.

When I was a kid JFK was wildly popular in my family and my neighborhood because we thought he was one of us - an Irish Catholic from MA. We didn't know beans about his policies, but, if we did, the threats to US Steel would have been just as popular. That was then; this is now.

We know more about our politicians today, and I hope we understand more about economics and liberty. Someone with JFK's family background and character might not get elected in today's climate, although we did have a close call with John Edwards because the mainstream media looked the other way.

One hopes that nowadays JFK's threat to sic his brother's DOJ (could a president put a close relative in the cabinet today?) on the steel companies because of a policy difference would be seen by most people as the mafia-like threat that it is.

Media libs have had their heads in the sand for quite awhile. Citizen dissatisfaction with the Obama administration is manifest across the country. The so-called "Massachusetts Massacre" is just the latest (and loudest) demonstration of it ... You're too late, Frank. The horse was out of the barn long before the MA special election.

Rich has a point, though he pushes it too far. Obama's personal popularity seems to be holding up pretty well, and I don't think it has much to do with white guilt, etc. Plus, although his job approval is down, it's still not terrible, just at the lower end of first year ratings for Presidents in the last 50-60 years.

I am not sure why this is, but it does not have a lot to do with his policies. The right track-wrong track surveys, and the disapproval of the health care program, make that pretty clear.

Obama still has a lot of latent personal goodwill to draw on. But it will erode if he does not get the policies right.

Plus the press has not turned on him yet. That may never happen, though if it does it will be with the savagery of a spurned lover.

Rich has a point, though he pushes it too far. Obama's personal popularity seems to be holding up pretty well, and I don't think it has much to do with white guilt, etc. Plus, although his job approval is down, it's still not terrible, just at the lower end of first year ratings for Presidents in the last 50-60 years.

I am not sure why this is, but it does not have a lot to do with his policies. The right track-wrong track surveys, and the disapproval of the health care program, make that pretty clear.

Obama still has a lot of latent personal goodwill to draw on. But it will erode if he does not get the policies right.

Plus the press has not turned on him yet. That may never happen, though if it does it will be with the savagery of a spurned lover.

These guys are fucking clueless, and the best I can suggest to all of you guys that have any sense is to not get comfortable. Just because they now have only 59 votes in the senate doesn't mean they can't do plenty of damage.

Liberals read Frank Rich to salve their blown minds when it comes to dealing with reality and the Democrats continued failures with,well, tools shown to fail, without fail, in the past.

He is, fankly, a stain on the truth and American society, continually attempting correlations where none exist: The record cold weather PROVES global warming! Mel Gibson's father is an idiot, so Mel Gibson is a Nazi! Iraq is a success, so Bush is responsible for Obama's economic failures!

That is why progress is behind in America on the major issues: Frank Rich is the comforter and bedtime storyteller to the liberals and Dmeocrats of America.

The NYT's Nobel Prize winning economist/columnist hasn't exactly been able to lead his President into the light of economic recovery, although he surely thinks he could. Rich needs to stick with a subject he knows.....um.. er.. nevermind.

A lot of people are reduced to hoping Obama is at least that proverbial broken clock. And when time eventually catches up to those frozen hands, they will foolishly think it was never broken to begin with.